The present invention relates to data conversion in print processing, and more particularly, it relates to data conversion into print data in a format of general-purpose electronic document.
An operating system (OS) employed in a computer decides what kind of display format is used, when a document handled on the computer is displayed, printed, or the like.
For example, MacOSX (trademark), which is developed as OS for Macintosh (trademark) of Apple Computer, Inc., employs as a standard display format, PDF (Portable Document Format) (trademark), which is a general-purpose electronic document having been developed by Adobe systems, Inc.
Generally, a printer is not capable to interpret by itself a document described in PDF. Therefore, when the document described in PDF is printed, a processing as shown in FIG. 7 is carried out. Here, there will be explained an example in which a document generated by application section 620 in computer 60 is printed by printer 70.
That is, PDF converting section 611 provided in the OS section 610 converts the document described in PDF into the bitmap format. Printer driver section 630 converts the data in the bitmap format into print data which the printer 70 is capable to interpret, and outputs thus converted data to the printer 70.
Then, the printer 70 performs printing based on a print image, and a print result as exactly shown on the display of the computer 60 can be obtained.